Libraries and Museums: Year In Review 1995

MUSEUMS

The year 1995 saw the "information superhighway" become part of the mainstream of museum work. Systems for transmitting and receiving high-quality graphic images were developing rapidly, and museums throughout the world began to exploit the great potential of publication and communication on the World Wide Web. By midyear the Virtual Library museums Web site, originated by Jonathan Bowen at the University of Oxford, had received a quarter of a million "hits" (electronic visits), and an average of one new museum site was being added every day. Some, like the Vatican Museums and Galleries, even offered a "virtual museum visit." Some feared that virtual visits could replace real museum visits, but initial evidence suggested the opposite. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) also established an electronic presence during the year, supported by the Swedish National Museum of Natural History.

The triennial ICOM World Congress of Museums in July in Stavanger, Norway, focused attention on the "economic liberalization" policies of many governments that had resulted in major reductions in the level of public funding or in the privatization of museums--or even outright closures. For example, the government of Zimbabwe decided to phase out subsidies for its national museums and monuments service and replace them with capital investments in income-generating initiatives. Likewise, major collections in Russia were developing video and CD-ROM products with an eye to replacing moneys not forthcoming from the state.

A June 1995 advisory from a mission of museum experts from Quebec to Armenia recommended that all available funds be earmarked for saving a few national museums and creating a secure storage facility for the remaining collections.

In one of the most remarkable openings of 1995, the national Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, Croatia, completely reconstructed the famous Secessionist building. The new Museum of Sydney, Australia, explores the interaction between the British settlers and the Aboriginal population over two centuries. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum brought a spectacular building designed by I.M. Pei to a lakeside setting in Cleveland, Ohio. The new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, was expected to anchor a revitalized museum centre that would include a Jewish museum and a Mexican museum, which launched a fivefold expansion into a new $15 million facility. That city’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum undertook a $61 million bond measure to construct earthquake-proof galleries.

The new "punk architecture" art museum in the old city centre of Groningen, Neth., masterminded by Alessandro Mendini (designer of the Swatch watch), and the new home of the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Neth., designed by Aldo Rossi, also won acclaim. The Brooklyn (N.Y.) Museum opened its reinstallation of the African Galleries, and Philadelphia’s Museum of Art concluded its three-year-long reinstallation of 80 European art galleries. University museum-expansion projects included the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington and the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Fla. In Egypt the former Nileside villa of politician and art collector Mahmoud Khalil, which housed his collection of European masters, opened. Other world museums announcing major renovation and expansion plans included London’s Tate Gallery, Madrid’s Prado, and New York City’s American Museum of Natural History and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art received a surprise gift of $35 million--one of the largest in its history--from Frank A. Cosgrove, Jr., while Olga Hirshhorn, widow of the founder of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., promised her 700-work modern art collection to another Washington institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art. For much of the year, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington was involved in the debate about the Enola Gay exhibit. (SeeSidebar.)

The Los Angeles-based nonprofit Lannan Foundation announced that it would end its exhibition program and disperse its 1,500 works of 20th-century modernist art to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts met its fiscal deficit by cutting 20% of its personnel and scaling back exhibition activities. The museum also finalized a plan to establish its first foreign branch. In exchange for a 20-year loan of art works, Nagoya, Japan, offered a facility and a $50 million donation to the Boston Museum.

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